Lucasfilms Nixes Star Wars Live Screening

An anonymous reader writes "The Seattle PI has an article about Lucasfilms sending a cease and desist letter to a local Seattle-based theater company. The company had been planning to do a live parody of Star Wars in which they would turn off the sound and redub it live. This brings up the question are parodies fair use? And if so, should copyright holders be allowed to order people not to parody their work?"

Comments

Not parody

[anotherone]

Parody is alright, but these people are just showing the movie with no sound. That isn't parody, that's Showing The Movie With No Sound.

The vast number of Star Wars parodies that exist show that parodies are protected. What isn't protected is charging people $10 to see the movie and then talking over the whole thing.

From the article:

"In order to protect our copyright, anyone who plans to commercially exhibit our films has to go through the appropriate channels," said Lucasfilm spokeswoman Lynne Hale.

That is not an unreasonable demand.

If you ask me it sounds like Lucas was protecting Seattle. If anyone should be suing, it's Best Brain.

Re:Not parody

[gad_zuki!]

Exactly. From the article:

The main issue seems to be this: That Jet City charges $10 a head for the show. If the show were free, there's a chance that the legal department of Lucasfilm would not have responded. After all, the anonymous fellow who created "The Phantom Edit" (a version of "Star Wars: Episode 1 -- The Phantom Menace" sans Jar Jar Binks) never really got in trouble with Lucasfilm.

"It wasn't commercially exhibited -- they weren't doing it for profit," said Hale.

Copyright holders look the other way unless money is being exchanged. Of course, there's the larger issue of what fair use is, but they werent just parodying SWs they were projecting the footage and "adding on" their own product (their dialogue) and charging for it. Thats a lot like, say, translating the movie into another language, selling it, and not paying lucasfilm. Sure, that analogy isn't perfect but legally I think that's how its going to be seen.

The real downside of this is that you can't really "sample parody" anything anymore without permission and the dollars to back it up. Either you create a whole new work with no samples like "Spaceballs" or you're kinda out of luck.

I saw the Star Wars one man show here in Chicago last year or so and he charged money, but he didnt use anything other than his body to do his act. So he was completely free to charge. In fact a lawsuit by lucas would have (all things being equal) been lost.

ALso, what does this mean for all the movieoke people out there? Sure, I doubt they'll crack down on it, but venue owners may not like them anymore after this.

YRO? What's online got to do with this?

[LostCluster]

It seems like the "Your Rights Online" section of Slashdot has outgrown its name into a pure copyright-bashing area. Where's the "online" in this story? All we have here is a group of artists who wanted to do a live performance while showing the video half of a still-under-copyright movie. Having copyright laws that block that from happening against the copyright-holder's wishes may be annoying, but it's the law and they've gotta deal with it.

The connection to online is just plain not there... either this story belongs in the main index section instead, or this section needs a new name.

Re:guilty until proven innocent.

[CosmeticLobotamy]

Parody is not talking over someone else's movie. Parody is making your own movie. It's a very, very, very clear distinction. Whether Lucasfilms was being jerks or not is up for debate, but this has nothing to do with parody.

Re:No surprises here..

[h4rm0ny]

When I was a kid, some mates and I refilmed the entire orginal trilogy in about two hours. It was tricky as I was both Vader and Skywalker and we only had one Storm Trooper so we kept stopping and starting the camcorder so that this one Storm Trooper could run in and get shot repeatedly. It also led to the immortal line, "That's not a moon, that's a football."

All of this utterly irrelevant however, unless any of my mates are reading. For me, the issue is not the legality or not, but the actual effects of the performance. First - does this harm the film company? Well, it's unlikely that people will go to see the theatre company's version instead of the original and I don't see how else it would harm their profits. And I doubt that it will be grossly defamatory to the people involved with Star Wars.

So why should anyone have the right to stop them? Yes they are profiting through it, the article says $10 a head. But it doe sn't cost Lucas anything. It's money out of nothing and it's creative. Everything new evolves from something that came befor e. To put a lock on anything that grows out of your work is to kill the whole line of it's artistic descendants.

Re:No surprises here..

[The Snowman]

...and also, don't worry about what others are parodying around with your movies. It's called "fair use".

It may be, but at first glance it is a gray area. Not all parodies are fair use, live or not. Without knowing what the theater group has planned for his copyright work, he is justifiably skeptical. Granted it probably is fair use, but Lucas does not have the time to go around checking what every person with a parody is doing. Corporate lawyers have nothing to lose by being overly zealous. Win or lose, the individual lawyers will laugh all the way to the bank.

Unfortunately, once the attack dogs (a.k.a. lawyers) are on the scent, the situation turns ugly and expensive. Hopefully when the dust settles Lucas will get enough $100 bills to burn in his fireplace to keep him warm on his large estate, and the theater group will be free to perform their act under fair use provisions. Time will tell, probably once the new DVDs sell enough and Episode III is through with its theater run.

George is worried about his legacy...well, he's killed his legacy himself.

George needs to learn that money is not everything. Piss off your hardcore fans and suddenly you find yourself in a world of shit. With the Internet to unite fanboys worldwide, he could face organized boycotts, negative reviews, and negative word of mouth advertising. I, for one, hate the man. He had some great visions and great films, but he shows his true colors over and over: greed unfettered with respect for his loyal fans.